333 free handwriting and hand-drawn symbol fonts

I’m currently designing a logo where the client wants to use a font that looks handwritten and fun, but still professional and sophisticated. I’m not a big fan of most handwriting fonts, as they are often too messy or cutesy looking to do anything practical with them. It’s been a struggle to find something I think will work.

Luckily, I ran into a large source of free handwriting fonts called Fonts for Peas, part of the kevin & amanda blog. These are fonts that are meant to be used for scrapbooking, family blogs, and the like, so most of them are pretty cutesy. But, with 333 to currently choose from, you’re bound to find a few that you could use. All of the handwriting fonts are based on actual handwriting samples that readers of the blog send in, so they’re pretty diverse. I downloaded a couple dozen myself and am excited to try them in my logo comps.

Jane Austen quotations set in Pea Bandit, Pea Mystie Caps, and Pea Anderson.

Mixed in with the handwriting fonts are a few hand-drawn symbol fonts that would make nice icons. There’s also another section of the site called Free Scrapbook Fonts that currently has over 100 decorative fonts to choose from.

Now, I know these aren’t very high quality fonts, in terms of kerning and metrics and ligatures and all those things that make a professional font a professional font. But, I think many of them will work in small doses, especially if you’re going to be manually kerning and tweaking them yourself.

These fonts are free for personal use, and you can use them for free commercially if you display a button linking back to the site. If you don’t want to do this, you can buy a single-font license for $10. (That’s what I’ll be doing if I end up using a font in the logo I’m working on.) Read all the details in the terms of use.